If readers follow the instructions on the front cover of Janus Head’s
special issue on “The Situated Body” to rotate the volume 90 degrees counterclockwise
so that Arakawa and Gins’ symmetrical image’s mirror line moves from horizontal
to vertical, they begin to enter the theme, reading the statement: “What
stems from the body, by way of awareness, should be held to be of it. Any
site at which a person deems an X to exist should be considered a contributing
segment of her awareness.” At the outset, Shaun Gallagher’s editorial explains
the difference between “a living and experiencing body” being situated
and “simply being located someplace in the way a non-living, non-experiencing
object is located.”

The essays that follow explore this theme within and between many disciplines
including “philosophical anthropology, cognitive science, phenomenology,
architecture and painting, and artistic performances like dance and music”
(Gallagher). Investigated in and through recent and profound advances
in technology, the very old discussion of human experience continues from
new angles and new dimensions open. Ingar Brinck, for example, examines
artistic experience from this perspective: “seen from a cognitive point
of view, artist and viewer have more in common than what distinguishes
them.” Tucked among the essays are several poems and stories. The act of
translation, particularly translation of Swedish women poets, and the place
of these poets in contemporary Swedish poetry is discussed in Håkan
Sandgren’s review of To Catch a Life Anew: 10 Swedish Women Poets,
translations by Eva Claeson (Oyster River Press, 2006). One of Claeson’s
translations of Marie Lundquist from the book appears in this volume of
Ars Interpres.

In extra compact newspaper size, the Winter 2006/2007 no man’s land
presents English translations of contemporary German writers, an incredible
bargain at one euro for 40 pages. The issue gathers translations of poetry
and fiction selected from the tenth anniversary edition of the Berlin-based
magazine lauter niemand. Not only an in-print and online forum for
the meeting of these two languages, the no man’s land project organizes
live readings and discussions as well as regular German to English workshops,
where translators can bring works in progress for general comment and intensive
exploration of each agonizing word choice. As Isabel Cole explains on the
Web site (www.no-mans-land.org), the title of this English translation
journal itself is emblem for the whole endeavor: lauter niemand,
Kafka’s untranslatable phrase, becomes through “an allusive approach” something
somewhat different in the English version, no man’s land. There’s recognition
here of both the inevitable loss and the opportunity in translation.

Several of the poems and stories make chilling forays into this border
territory: “the secret pleasure in self-erasure / goes with those places
where you can’t go” (Andrej Glusgold, tr. Donna Stonecipher); “shows
where he was grafted: / there! in this banished place” (Ulf Stolterfoht,
tr. Andrew Duncan);”Our arrival was catastrophically fine, / the sky picturesquely
colourless, the present / like a precise body of water” (Ron Winkler, tr.
Iain Galbraith). But the issue is packed with a multiplicity of subjects
and perspectives, the work of more than three dozen writers and translators,
many of whom were born in the 1970s and 80s. It would be difficult to turn
down the invitation that opens the poem on the final page (Orsolya Kalász,
tr. Donna Stonecipher): “Would you like to come over / into my language?”
Be ready for no ordinary transaction: “Let’s exchange / give me the key
/ you take the ghost.”

In 2007, for the second year in a row, Poetry, under the editorship
of Christian Wiman, celebrated April, national poetry month in the U.S.,
with a translation issue (also a great value at $3.75 U.S. dollars), a
sustained look outward, away from poems written in American English. The
poets in this issue come from most of the continents, with heavy European
representation including Alcman, Horace, Dante, Rimbaud, among others.
A number of poets and translators whose work has appeared in Ars Interpres
appear here also (for example, “Days and the Transit System Grind Their
Teeth” by Regina Derieva, translated by Daniel Weissbort).

A translator’s note accompanies each poem. At times fascinating, the
comments fortunately don’t drown out the poems themselves. Only one note
runs longer than a page. Some translators place the poet or the poem in
historical or literary context. Many describe the daily struggle’s endless
decisions about how to convey the music of the original or how to find
an equivalent for a lexically rich word with as little loss as possible,
along with some of translation’s stranger discomforts (“If there’s such
a thing as slapstick with a foreign language dictionary, then I’m its involuntary
master.” -- Jacqueline Osherow). A few give the basic theory of translation
from which they work. Citing Dryden’s famous statement about trying to
make Vergil speak the English he would have, had he been born in England,
Charles Simic adds: “I hope he is right. Otherwise, I’ll burn in hell,
which is already full of translators of poetry.”